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October Issue

Do you know how I live? A look into the dangers of marijuana use.

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Do You Know How to Live?
By Stephanie Boyd
I want to be able to express to you how I feel and why, and make you believe. I want the whole world to be able to feel truly alive, the way we can feel when we learn who we are and when we allow ourselves to feel.

The passion with which I hate marijuana was once incomprehensible, even to me. The hate was there, I knew it was, but it has been a long journey for me to come to an understanding with it. This is what I’ve learned from myself.

Let’s start with a more broad view. I hate that we live in a world where just feeling like yourself isn’t enough and where having fun soberly seems almost completely improbable.
“I smoked weed to have fun around people that I thought loved me but when I got around people that really loved me I found that the fun was in just being myself.’-Anonymous

It seems to me that the population would rather feel numb -or more, not feel at all- than deal with any of their emotions and have to be brave enough to show the world who they truly are. We, as a society, have lost the capability to intertwine our own personal styles and uniqueness’ together, to have fun and live, and have made it seem simpler to just have a mutual numbness. It’s a tragedy, because none of us are any happier - maybe even sadder – because of it.

It has taken us all away; dulled us down and tricked us into believing that out feelings are wrong and inadequate and that we shouldn’t need help with our pain or want to share our happiness.

Eventually, though, those dulled, hidden feelings will come back, grown bigger and stronger. It is, after all, human nature to feel hurt and sadness, so that the happiness and ecstasy we can feel from truly living and breathing in the wonder of life around us, can be felt. We have taken ourselves away from our human nature; the very essence that drives us, and so we are driven no more.

And on a much more personal level, I have also been affected. Maybe you smoke weed, and –if so- before you read this, do not assume that I am only looking from the outside in. I, myself, have been on the inside too. The thing is, I have seen it affect so many people I love deeply. You may never be able to understand, because maybe weed has already taken you away, or you might be another who looks at it as “just for fun”. Butt it goes so much deeper than that. I have watched weed take people away from the world; take them to a place where they are so “out of it” and so far away.

I have felt weed take people away from me; felt the rejection and the sadness of than fact that the ones I love most secretly need weed more than me to be happy. I’ve felt and seen them be taken to places where they don’t care about me and places where I, as a “buzz kill”, am not allowed. It is through the sadness I’ve felt undeniably that I know my hatred is justified. Having the ones I love most want to get high more than spend time with me or to not simply be able to be with me without being high has created this barrier.

The thing I’ve seen that causes me the most sorrow is how marijuana can take the people I love away from themselves. I have felt the change in them, from people with love and happiness and dreams and aspirations, to people who don’t care and don’t love. It is a sad world where everything slows down to a dark, dull, shaking violence and you sit “having fun” in the slow spinning of nothingness.

Have you ever watched the sun reflect on the water and dance like fallen crystals? The world still holds so much life that we hide or mask in these slow, dull, other worlds. Have you felt the awe in observing the wind blowing tiny blades of grass, gently rocking them? Or the fluffy, clear white clouds hanging like a picture in the light, deep blue sky? You don’t have to go far to find beauty. I just want the world to be able to feel the beauty in being themselves and doing what they can discover they love, more than getting high and “away” from this world. There is so much more to find in the world than another plant, or another thing to escape. I want the whole world to be able to feel the truest high you can feel, by really living life and living it for ourselves. I want life to be what our world is about again.

“Weed is no different from any other drug out there. You see it again and again until you don’t get high from it anymore, and you keep searching for a better high. And trust me; you’ll get lost in the search.” - Anonymous